The demand for high-speed wireless communication services continues to rise. In response to this increased demand, wireless communication service providers may deploy heterogeneous networks as an efficient way to improve system capacity and enhance network coverage. A heterogeneous network contains wireless access nodes that have different characteristics, such as transmission power and radio frequency (RF) coverage areas. For example, a wireless coverage area provided by a macrocell base station may be supplemented by many smaller, low-power nodes, such as femtocells, picocell base stations, and relay nodes.
However, the larger footprint of a macrocell base station often encompasses the relatively smaller coverage areas of picocell base stations in a heterogeneous network. Thus, in situations where the picocell base stations share the same RF spectrum as the macrocell base station, strong interference may be introduced to wireless signals transmitted by the picocell base stations. To curb the deleterious effects of such interference, time-domain resource partitioning schemes may be utilized in heterogeneous networks. Time-domain partitioning typically reserves certain subframes for the macrocell base station and reserves other subframes for the picocell base stations. In this manner, a higher signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is achieved in reserved subframes for both the macrocell base station and picocell base stations, which enables higher data rates for wireless communications transmitted to user communication devices.